& Friends on Technology Policy

Kremlin’s Plan to Prevent a Facebook Revolution

Andrei Soldatov has an opinion piece in the Moscow Times on how Moscow may respond to a wave of social media-based revolutionary fervor. An excerpt:

That is precisely how the FSB and Interior Ministry reacted to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt — by proposing Criminal Code amendments that would have made the owners of online social networks responsible for all content posted on their sites. Apparently, the idea is not to incriminate the owners of Facebook and Vkontakte of extremism personally, but to force them to pass responsibility on to individual users by requiring each to sign a contract that includes their passport information.